So yesterday I had a conversation with my sister about some of the problems with the Bush Administration, and she felt that the two biggest problems were Bush’s inexperience and his inability to question his decisions/learn from his mistakes. I shouldn’t put words into her blog, so to speak, so maybe she’ll speak up about it herself. (That is, if she has the guts to write anything that could be controversial in her backwoods town. Her friends and family read that stuff. She can’t let them know she’s secretly a communist.)

I said while I agreed with the latter argument, I don’t really buy that experience has a whole lot to do with success as a President. My feeling was that no job can really prepare you to be President. It’s not like you can go govern a minor league country (states don’t count!) and then get called up with there’s an opening in the rotation. So that was my gut instinct, but I thought I should see if it held water. To do so, I researched all our Previous presidents, sorted out their experience by type (Legislative, Executive, Other, Military) and by level (Local, National). I then compared al these numbers to an average of rankings, found here.

My full results can be seen here. The excel file, if you’d like to screw with it yourself, is here. Ideally, I’d like to be able to form an equation that would find the optimal amount of each kind of experience to determine the ideal candidate, but, though I’m sure it can be done and I even think I’ve done it before, I can’t figure it out. Even a nice graphical interface would be nice.

Here are the averages:

Age: 54.83
Local Legislative Experience: 1.1
National Legislative Experience: 5.6
Local Executive: 2.2
National Executive: 2.2
Other Local Public Service: .6
Other National Public Service: .9
Military: 5
Total years of service, all combined: 17.57

Anyhow, my analysis of the results can be found after the jump…

I looked at the three main candidates and compared them to everyone else based on their experience. Each of the candidates really has only has two different kinds of experience, so I just looked at candidates that had experience in the same type of public service work and were on the same side of the average.

Obama has greater than average local legislative experience (7), less than average national legislative experience (4), and no military experience. This puts him with Lincoln, FDR, Carter, Coolidge, and Andrew Johnson. Lincoln and FDR rank as the #1 and #2 best presidents according to my average ranking, while the other three are in the worst quarter (29st, 31st, 39th, resp.).

Caveats: All but Lincoln had executive level experience:

FDR (4 as Governor, 7 as VP)
Carter (4 as Governor)
Coolidge (4 as Governor, Lt. Governor, 2 as VP)
Johnson (4 as Governor)

Caveat to Caveat: All but FDR were terrible! This could be interpreted as a good thing if you’re an Obama fan.  At least it shows that being a governor ain’t much, not that we don’t already know that.

Next up is Clinton- greater than average national legislative experience (8), greater than average national executive experience (20* -I originally counted her experience as “Other Public Service” because I don’t buy the First Lady as really being executive experience, however it’s all she can point to so I gave it to her. Plus she’d be impossible to compare to others.) These stats put her with JQA (19th), Van Buren (24th), Nixon (32nd), and Buchanon (41st), all average-to-bad presidents. Jefferson (4th) and Adams (11th) each had 4 years National Legislative experience, which is just slightly less than the average, so they could be included to be charitable to Clinton.

Finally, McCain. Greater than average national legislative experience (24), greater than average military experience (25). This places him in the company of Harry S Truman alone, though Truman, who ranked 7th, only had 6 years of military service, compared to McCain’s 25. Those with greater than 25 years military experience, though with little to no National Legislative service, include Washington (3rd), Jackson (8th), Eisenhower (9th) who all ranked well, though Taylor and Grant ranked poorly (34th and 37th) .

Age not that big a deal as it is relatively evenly dispersed throughout the rankings, though Obama would be 5th youngest and McCain oldest. Clinton slightly above average for age. Though I think this data, if anything, paints a good picture for Obama, I think the real thing is that it does in fact prove my gut feeling: experience doesn’t mean a whole lot for this job.